ld is meant both
heaven and hell. In heaven are to be seen all those things that are good
uses (of which in a preceding article, n. 336). In hell are to be seen all
those that are evil uses (see just above, n. 338, where they are
enumerated). These are wild creatures of every kind, as serpents,
scorpions, great snakes, crocodiles, tigers, wolves, foxes, swine, owls
of different kinds, bats, rats, and mice, frogs, locusts, spiders, and
noxious insects of many kinds; also hemlocks and aconites, and all kinds
of poisons, both of herbs and of earths; in a word, everything hurtful
and deadly to man. Such things appear in the hells to the life precisely
like those on and in the earth. They are said to appear there; yet they
are not there as on earth, for they are mere correspondences of lusts
that swarm out of their evil loves, and present themselves in such forms
before others. Because there are such things in the hells, these abound
in foul smells, cadaverous, stercoraceous, urinous, and putrid, wherein
the diabolical spirits there take delight, as animals do in rank stenches.
From this it can be seen that like things in the natural world did not
derive their origin from the Lord, and were not created from the
beginning, neither did they spring from nature through her sun, but are
from hell. That they are not from nature through her sun is plain, for
the spiritual inflows into the natural, and not the reverse. And that
they are not from the Lord is plain, because hell is not from Him,
therefore nothing in hell corresponding to the evils of its inhabitants
is from Him.

340. (3) There is unceasing influx out of the spiritual world into the
natural world. He who does not know that there is a spiritual world, or
that it is distinct from the natural world, as what is prior is distinct
from what is subsequent, or as cause from the thing caused, can have no
knowledge of this influx. This is the reason why those who have written
on the origin of plants and animals could not do otherwise than ascribe
that origin to nature; or if to God, then in the sense that God had
implanted in nature from the beginning a power to produce such things,
- not knowing that no power has been implanted in nature, since nature,
in herself, is dead, and contributes no more to the production of these
things than a tool does, for instance, to the work of a mechanic, the
tool acting only as it is continually moved. It is the spiritual, deriving
its origin